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Vae Enters Permanent Maintenance Mode
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May 21, 2019

Hello,

It’s with a heavy heart that I am writing to tell you that we are officially moving the Vae product into a permanent maintenance-only mode.

When we first released Vae in 2007, the e-commerce and CMS landscape was drastically different. Vae’s one-stop-shop approach seemed promising, Wordpress was still a small startup, and Shopfiy’s shadow was not nearly as long. However, we failed to appreciate the importance of the open-source nature of Wordpress and the community-driven app marketplace of Shopify. As a result, those platforms have a much richer community of plugins and extensions with which we’ll never be able to compete. Also, static site generators such as Jekyll and Github Pages have replaced many of the use cases we developed Vae for, and they do so with much greater community support.

As such, Vae has not grown at the pace necessary for us to sustain releasing new features and updates. We do not make a profit on Vae today, even without factoring in the costs of ongoing development and customer support.

We know that you have invested considerably in the development of your Vae sites, which is why we resisted calls from investors and advisors to shutter Vae completely. We feel that a better option for the company and our customers is to shift into a maintenance-only mode, the details of which are as follows:

We will no longer be adding new features or keeping integrations with third parties up to date.

We will make updates as-needed to keep the core of Vae’s services running, but are not guaranteeing that every aspect and feature will continue to work.

We will no longer be providing any refunds because of Vae service availability.

We currently have no timeline on shutting down Vae entirely, but we will not be doing so until at least 2021. If we do decide to fully shut down Vae, we will notify you at least 180 days prior.

To minimize the burden this may cause you and other customers, we reached out to a number of third parties to see if they were interested in taking over Vae’s development. While nobody showed interest, substantial portions of Vae are already open source, and we are happy to continue to review any pull requests you want to make.

We appreciate your loyalty and support over the 12 years, and if you have any questions, you can contact us at 1-800-286-8372 or support@vaeplatform.com.

Sincerely,
Justin & Kevin
The only members remaining, The Vae Platform Team